Chapter 549: Valeria Da Silva [Bonus - ]

Chapter 549: Valeria Da Silva [Bonus Chapter]

Her right hand was out of fingers.

She looked at her open palm, realized she didn’t have a second hand to keep counting on, stared blankly at her empty left sleeve pinned flat to her ribs, and blinked in mild irritation.

Aki stared at her for a second, and then...

"Pfft—!"

A soft musical giggle escaped Aki’s lips, quickly dissolving into bright clear laughter that filled the quiet room.

Kara let out an exaggerated sigh, crossing her single arm over her chest and looking at Aki with a deadpan unimpressed smirk.

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Princess," Kara scoffed, though the corner of her mouth twitched with genuine amusement. "Very funny... A top-tier one-armed joke, you’re a regular comedian."

"I’m sorry!" Aki laughed, covering her mouth with her gloved hand as her eyes crinkled with unrestrained delight. "It was just... the way you stopped and stared at your thumb! It was adorable!"

"Whatever," Kara muttered, tossing the black glove into the air and catching it cleanly. "Pick an element before I decide to charge it with raw slime and make your fingers glow green."

Aki smoothed down her skirts, composing herself, though a fond smile remained on her lips.

"Wind. Please. If the right hand is for direct destructive power, I want the left hand to have mobility and deflection."

"Smart girl," Kara approved.

She held the black glove in her palm, her violet eyes flaring slightly as a swirling pale-green vortex of concentrated wind-mana gathered at her fingertips.

FSSSSSH.

The miniature cyclone hissed as it was forcibly compressed, sinking directly into the silver runes etched along the seams of the black leather.

The runes flared with a soft jade brilliance for two seconds before settling down into a metallic sheen.

Kara handed it over.

"Put it on."

Aki took the black glove and slid her left hand into the silk lining.

SNAP!

The leather contracted instantly as the same sharp electric spark traveled up her left arm and jolted her spine but this time, she was prepared.

She gritted her teeth, planted her slippers, and absorbed the shock without stumbling, letting the cold, light feeling of wind-mana settle comfortably into her fingers.

She looked at her hands.

"Silas," Aki asked, looking up curiously. "Do I have to use them strictly for elemental spells? Like shooting fireballs or wind blades?"

Kara shook her head.

"Nope. That’s the beauty of Thora’s design... You don’t just have to sling projectiles. You can take the raw mana stored inside your necklace and cycle it straight into your outer skin then you can form a mana shield over your forearms to block blows, or pour it directly into your quadriceps and calves to give yourself three times your normal sprint speed."

Kara stepped forward, reaching up with her single hand to lightly touch the Star-Iron pendant resting against Aki’s throat.

Her fingers paused and her violet eyes narrowed behind her lenses.

’Wait a second,’ Kara thought with her thumb tracing the surface of the three mana diamonds set into the metal.

The reservoir was light.

Nearly twenty percent of the compressed mana Silas had personally poured into the stones days ago was missing...

Kara slowly lowered her hand, looking down at Aki.

Aki’s eyes immediately darted to the right, studiously inspecting a completely unremarkable brass wall sconce with sudden intense fascination.

Her lips were pressed into a tight guilty line with her cheeks faintly pink.

Kara’s eyebrow arched.

"Aki," Kara said slowly, her voice dripping with deadpan suspicion. "Did you... as a completely Unawakened civilian with zero internal channels... try to siphon raw mana out of that necklace and force it into your own physical body?"

Aki kept her gaze locked entirely on the wall sconce and she didn’t move a muscle.

"Only a suicidal idiot would try to convert unrefined external mana into a body without mana channels," Kara continued. "That’s how people rupture their spleen and spend two weeks vomiting black bile in an intensive care ward."

Aki slowly shifted her eyes back toward Kara, looking like a scolded puppy that had been caught chewing on the leg of an antique dining table.

"I... I was careful..." Aki whispered defensively with her voice barely audible. "I only took a tiny microscopic sip... I just wanted to see what it felt like to have energy moving through my arms..."

Kara stared at her.

Deep down, Silas couldn’t even be genuinely angry.

The girl had spent years living in a country where personal worth was entirely dictated by the hum of mana in your chest.

To be handed a necklace holding radiant power and be expected to just let it sit there like a piece of dead jewelry... of course she had tried to touch it.

It was stupid, reckless, and insanely dangerous, but it was completely human.

"You’re an idiot," Kara sighed, shaking her head. "A cute idiot, but an idiot nonetheless."

"I’m not an idiot," Aki mumbled under her breath, pouting. "I survived, didn’t I?"

"Because you have royal blood," Kara muttered.

Kara stepped close, placing her single palm against the pendant, channeling a dense golden-blue stream of refined mana back into the three diamonds until the crystals hummed with deep satisfied sound.

As the energy flowed, Kara pulled back slightly with her thoughts drifting inward.

’All of this is only possible because of her bloodline,’ Silas mused silently, watching the diamonds absorb the charge.

As much as Silas despised the King of the World, the reality of House Castellian was undeniable.

Aki’s royal blood was an extraordinary miraculous catalyst.

When Silas had forged the necklace and woven the prototype mana circuits back in Blessed Land, they had used several drops of Aki’s own blood to key the whole thing.

Her blood had adapted to the foreign mana with effortless fluidity... almost identical to the way Talira’s ancient dragon blood absorbed energy and adapted.

During the grueling physical training Aki had endured over the past months, whenever she had scraped her knees or bled through her bandages, the mana in the air had subtly gravitated toward the wounds, accelerating her recovery.

’Hopefully, we can figure out a way to help her condense a real Lord Core at least...’ Silas thought, staring at her delicate profile.

A Lord Core was different from a standard combat core.

It was anchored to a territory but even then, without a random celestial artifact, the chances of an Unawakened mortal condensing a core from scratch were astronomically low.

Still, Silas refused to drop the project.

’Eluned said she could do it,’ Kara recalled with her brow furrowing slightly.

Eluned had casually mentioned during an evening meal that she once possessed a skill capable of reconstructing a shattered or awakening a dormant spiritual core but the moment the thought crossed Kara’s mind, an irritated bitter scowl twisted her lips.

’Except the System stripped it away,’ Kara thought, clicking her tongue in sharp frustration.

Silas despised that specific restriction.

Every time he summoned a legendary Hero into Blessed Land, the overarching System mechanics forced them to undergo a reset... stripping away their legendary skills, sealing their masteries, and forcing them to start their progression from square one under his territorial banner.

Eluned remembered that she had the skill centuries ago, but the actual pathways to cast the spell were locked behind her personal progression tiers.

’Stupid game mechanics...’ Kara grumbled internally. ’One of these days I’m going to find the entity behind that interface and punch it in the jaw.’

Suddenly, the air shifted and Kara’s eyes snapped toward the heavy oak door.

Across the threshold, approaching with exceptionally heavy footsteps, an unmistakable presence had just cleared the corridor checkpoint.

It was a tempered aura that was not the scuffling of the guards. Kara stepped away from Aki, strolling casually toward the entrance and she turned the brass handle, pulling the heavy oak door open with a single effortless tug.

Standing on the polished obsidian flagstones outside was Valeria Da Silva.

’Is it just me or does she look a bit different...? I can’t place it.’

The High Marshal-President of Amazon stood tall and imposing, her broad muscular shoulders draped in a pristine tailored military trench coat cut from dark olive wool, adorned with gold bullion aiguillettes and high-ranking campaign ribbons across her left breast.

Her dark scarred skin was taut, her sharp amber-brown eyes radiating the cool authority of a woman who had butchered horrors with her bare hands.

Flanking her half a step behind were two female military attendees in matching olive service dress with their posture rigid as iron bars and their hands resting formally on the pommels of their side-arms.

Da Silva stopped.

She looked at Kara with her lips parting as she adopted the formal, diplomatic greeting customary among the sovereign warrior-clans of Amazon.

She tilted her head forward by a measured respectful three inches, raising her right fist across her breastplate in a salute.

"I am High Marshal-President Valeria Da Silva of the Amazonian—"

SLAM!

The heavy oak door was violently shoved shut right in her face.

CLICK!

The brass latch locked into place and outside in the corridor, the silence was deafening.

Da Silva remained frozen in mid-salute with her fist pressed against her coat and her head still slightly tilted forward, staring at the polished brass door knocker resting three inches from her nose.

Behind her, the two military attendees inhaled sharply with their eyes nearly bulging out of their skulls and their fingers instinctively tightening around the hilts of their blades in horrified shock.

How rude! the thought screamed through Da Silva’s mind.

Nobody on the face of the Earth... not the King of the World, not the Grand Tsar of Borealis, not the masked of the World Council had ever slammed a door in Valeria Da Silva’s face.

Yet... before the heavy wood had snapped shut, Da Silva had caught the expression on the one-armed woman’s face.

Kara hadn’t closed the door out of fear.

She had closed it with a wide entertained grin plastered across her sharp features... It was a look of childish glee that said she had deliberately shut the door simply because she knew how utterly absurd and disrespectful it was.

A tiny involuntary shiver ran down Da Silva’s spine.

’She really takes pride in people’s suffering,’ Da Silva thought with a mixture of disbelief and dark admiration warring in her chest.

Unlike most of the political figureheads sitting at the Grand Table.. bureaucrats like Julian Vanderbilt Senior who hid behind balance sheets, artillery contracts, and corporate security details, Da Silva was an authentic martial prodigy.

She was an accomplished Lord in her own right, commanding a vast blood-soaked territory deep within the lower rims of the Sovereign Realm.

She knew violence intimately.

Yet as Da Silva stared at the heavy oak door, an honest cold realization settled in her gut.

’Would I be able to survive on the battlefield of Blessed Land?’

Blessed Land wasn’t a simple territory at all.

’On the stream... they had a Red Dragon.’

Red Dragons were terrifying beings that were extinct... except for that one, Kara had the only dragon of that kind known as of right now and now, she was standing on the other side of this wooden door as humanity’s only active Gold Core.

Da Silva shook her head, letting out a soft dry breath through her nose.

’No,’ she concluded honestly. ’I wouldn’t last five minutes.’

Before her attendees could draw their sabers to demand satisfaction, the brass latch clicked again.

CREEEAK!

The oak door swung open once more.

Kara was standing in the threshold with her single right hand rubbing the back of her neck, offering a lazy half-assed grimace that barely passed for an apology.

"Sorry about that," Kara grumbled. "Force of habit. I saw uniforms and my hands moved on their own but you’re Aki’s friend, right? Come on in."

Da Silva recovered her composure in a fraction of a second.

She lowered her fist, offering a calm nod. "Thank you, Lord Vespera."

She stepped across the threshold, her heavy military boots clicking cleanly on the floorboards.

Her two attendees followed with their heads bowed low and their movements stiff with reverent caution.

They kept their gazes locked strictly onto the Persian rug, terrified of doing anything that might draw the attention of the black-haired woman leaning casually against the doorframe.

Inside the chamber, Aki had already stepped forward.

The moment Aki saw the High Marshal, the lingering tension on her face vanished, replaced by a soft genuine smile of pure relief.

"Valeria!" Aki called out softly, stepping forward with open arms.

Da Silva’s sharp features softened instantly. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The cold persona of the Amazonian warlord melted away as she stepped into the embrace, wrapping her muscular arms gently around Aki’s smaller frame in a warm protective hug.

Kara stood near the closed door, leaning her shoulder against the wall with her violet eyes watching the two women with a mixture of curiosity and mild surprise.

’They’re that close?’ Kara thought, her eyebrows raising slightly.